Celestial Silks: Chinese religious and court textiles
Celestial Silks offers a rare opportunity to view over 70 visually spectacular and sumptuous Chinese religious and court textiles...
We are fortunate that three rare early robes, which are recent acquisitions to the Hall Collection, form part of the exhibition. They are exquisite, intact examples dating from the 5th and 6th centuries and, as far as we know, this is the first time that robes from this period have been exhibited outside China.
The religious textiles from China and Tibet demonstrate the extensive use of Chinese textiles in places of worship as decorative hangings and for creating and mounting tangkas (devotional icons). A set of four symbolic 18th century tangkas has spectacular iconography. Three feature imagery with a landscape including corpses, skulls and human bones. The fourth presents the western paradise of the Buddha Amitayus, which was the reward for those observing discipline and compassion in life.
The second section of this absorbing exhibition is dedicated to court robes and textiles of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Robes worn at the Ming Court for celebratory festivals such as the Moon Festival are included. To enhance our appreciation of the lavish style of the Chinese courts, there is a rare collection of Festival badges and minutely embroidered imperial robes, replete with the Emperor's symbols.
A spectacular dragon banner, which would have originally hung in one of the palaces of the Imperial Clan, will find a temporary home in the new Asian galleries for the duration of the exhibition.
The final section is dedicated to showing uncut yardage of beautiful silks before they are shaped into religious and court robes and hangings. An unmade dragon robe of aubergine coloured silk (c.1850), with the ground entirely worked in peacock feathers and the dragons couched in gold wrapped silk thread, is an outstanding example of such exquisite work. Few robes and textiles with this type of work have survived in good condition because of insect damage.
W: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/current/celestial_silks
